Hi all, sorry this more an over simplistic question to ask and I'm guessing there are loads of different view on this. But here goes

I would like to rip my Blu-ray discs and store them on HD to play on my media center PC. Obviously 50GB is a bit heavy going for storage space. I'm just after an easy method to rip and the best format to store them. Balancing quality against compression.

Is DivX HD a good format?

Obviously, I understand the more the compression the more the loss of quality.

Too much like work. Squash BluRay down to 8GB? I'll just buy the DVD thanks.

It's been my experience that most people can not tell the diff between the original Blu-ray and BD9 version of the movie while being played. Even at 8gb the quality is much better than you see on DVD, after initially watching the movie the first time in BD, does one necessarily need to watch it again in BD if they merely trying to find something to do to pass time? But if one wants to see the movie in all its HD glory the original is always available and ready to be inserted into the blu-ray player.

I actually do the same thing but I have several media PCs in my home with a central file server, I no longer have to haunt all over the house to find movies someone neglected to put back on the self. I don't have to leave my bedroom to go down stairs to the theater room to find a movie. All my TV shows, music, and movies are at my finger tips, and readily available to stream to any TV in the house. Was a bit of work to set up, but now all my precious disk are locked away free of greasy finger prints and it's been years since I had a disk mysteriously vanish only to be found later under someones bed or in a couch.

@strontium_99 Good luck with your endeavor, as stated i do the same thing and to me it is very much worth the effort. I can now find any movie, or favorite TV episodes with a few mouse clicks.

Too much like work. Squash BluRay down to 8GB? I'll just buy the DVD thanks.

Of course I agree with him completely. Maybe my reason is that so many BRs are just not as good a quality as they should be.

There has been recent discussion about 120 and 240hz TVs that can make the movie look like Hidef videos rather than film. I watch all my movies that way. The clearer the better. So, I'm not about to re-encode to a lesser bitrate..

I also transfer all my BRs to MKV immediately. Most of them have never seen the inside of my PS3. This mainly done for 2 reasons. I want to watch the movie not the items that the BR supplier wants to sell me. Secondly, I like subtitles but I don't like them in the middle of my screen and I don't like them to be 3" tall on my big screen tv's.

I convert all my subtitles to srt and hech54 might say that might also be too much work. However, all my subtitles are now about 1" tall and with all wide screen movies that have upper and lower black bars they now reside in the black bar area below the movie and not inside of the movie. For 168 movies, I have the at the very bottom of the screen.

Well, I'm doing less and less re-encoding myself, for two reasons: I added a lot more hard drive space and I got a Blu-Ray burner. No more AVCHDs.

I've found many (most?) Blu-Rays don't require re-encoding the video to fit BD25 if you do movie-only and convert the audio to AC3 640 kbps. (For those that do require a re-encode, my newly built 6 core comp will do it in less than an hour). Many of my Blu-Rays have never been played on my set-tops; I hate menus and warnings and trailers and all that other junk so intensely.

Nevertheless, a Blu-Ray re-encoded to BD9 size (or ~8 GB MKV) can look pretty good. Try it and compare. Now I know edDV can tell, he's a pro, but I have a hard time telling the difference.

Yeah it does. All cores (3.5 GHz OC) going flat out at 97-100% constant. Mind you, I do movie-only in BDRB using one-pass High Speed BD25 setting. Takes about 30-35 minutes at 3.6x or so for the re-encode itself (two-hour movie), the remux and rebuild together take 22-24 minutes. Not counting extraction though, so I guess that puts it over an hour by a little.

The 6-core Phenom IIs have dropped a good bit in price since the Bulldozer CPUs rolled out. The BE (black edition) CPUs are easy to do a simple multiplier overclock (Core FID in the BIOS). Though I had to also nudge the Core VID a touch from 1.3250 volts to 1.3375 volts to get it stable. Using the stock CPU fan/heatsink, which is pretty decent, although a bit loud. Runs Prime95 now for an hour no problem. It'll do 3.4 GHz stable with only the multiplier overclock.

if it helps, I rip my Blu-rays with DVDFab 8 QT. I use avi. H.264. Audiocopy setting. I also rip the other audios and mux them togethere. When the audio is DTS, I use MKV because i notice errors with AVI with it. By the way, the videos end up being between 4-9 GB depending on their lenght, etc. They look very clean.

Hi all, sorry this more an over simplistic question to ask and I'm guessing there are loads of different view on this. But here goes

I would like to rip my Blu-ray discs and store them on HD to play on my media center PC. Obviously 50GB is a bit heavy going for storage space. I'm just after an easy method to rip and the best format to store them. Balancing quality against compression.

Is DivX HD a good format?

Obviously, I understand the more the compression the more the loss of quality.

Like I say, ease of ripping and encoding are the key here.

Any words of wisdom would be most gratefully received.

Thanks,

Andy.

Easiest and quickest is to rip it without re encoding. Should be half the size with no compromise in quality. Option A
Use MakeMKV to create an MKV file

Option B
You'll need to be running AnyDVD or DVD Passkey in the background.

Either method should take about 30-45 minutes. You'll get a 15-25GB .m2ts file that is full HD quality with full DTS or AC3, multi-channel audio.

If you want an even smaller file, use Ripbot264 or Handbrake to compress the file you made in step 1. The defult settings (high profile) are pretty good from either program, just make sure to select a CQ/CRF setting of 18 or lower.

To give you any further advice invites a long-winded discussion into which one of the 9,000 h264 settings should be tweaked for best quality v. size v. encode time.

I could offer more advice if I new what you were going to be using for playback.